From Daily Mail (UK)
By James Millbank
One of the main leaders of the illegal Dale Farm travellers camp in Essex was jailed for his role in a £9 million cigarette-smuggling racket.
Richard Sheridan, the main spokesman for travellers living illegally at the Crays Hill site near Basildon, Essex, has been convicted twice for evading excise.
Sheridan, 42, helped mastermind the cigarette-smuggling plot with his father John O’Brien, 64, who lives in Wolverhampton.
The pair were part of a gang estimated to have evaded £9 million in excise duty by smuggling 67.6 million fake cigarettes into Britain.
Sheridan received a 12-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to conspiracy to fraudulently evade excise duty in June 2006.
Customs seized 1,099,200 counterfeit cigarettes, which Sheridan and his father had arranged to be delivered to Hull Docks.
The cigarettes were concealed among fruit and vegetables in a lorry that arrived on June 2, 2003. Duty evaded was £161,000.
Less than a month later, Sheridan was arrested after being caught unloading 640,000 cigarettes from a trailer at a Midlands address where £69,000 cash was found.
